Not for a Faux Democracy

Suzanne Fields

2/11/2011 12:01:00 AM - Suzanne Fields

Democracy is more than a word. The protesting Egyptians and the
watching world are learning that between the Egyptian army and the Muslim
Brotherhood stand a lot to overcome. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton got
one thing right: "It needs to be an orderly, peaceful transition to real
democracy, not faux democracy."

Hope and change are not the same thing. Big talk and big deeds are
not the same thing, either, as our own experienced taught. Not everyone
believed the great Philadelphia experiment of 1776 would succeed, an
experiment born of hope not experience. Not everyone believes now that
what was wrought then will endure.

Despite all the high hopes that brought Barack Obama to the White
House, a lot of people here and elsewhere think he's presiding over a
weakened and dispirited America. Ronald Reagan's "morning in America"
has become, for these doubters, late afternoon.

To take advantage of his invoking a cliched Sputnik moment, certain
hard choices lie ahead. Federal spending must be cut -- "slashed" may be a
better word -- and the private sector must be unleashed to get things moving
again. This goes athwart Obama's instincts, but government must be put on a
crash diet (something not included in Michelle's anti-obesity crusade).

The president observed, accurately, in his State of the Union addressthat American competitiveness depends on better-educated workers and a
stronger incentive to succeed. This can only happen when bad teachers with
the seniority that makes them fireproof are dispatched to wherever bad
teachers go. The president's new emphasis on the decline of learning comes
with a new study that reveals that two-thirds of fourth-graders fail to show
proficiency in science; six of 10 eighth and 12th graders perform poorly in
science. They're not doing well in history, either.

How we change this for the better requires a debate, and whether it's civil or passionate isn't as important as getting the debate started. The
question is whether we have the stuff and imagination to transcend what
divides us, and that depends on how we assess who we are.

Claude Fischer, for 40 years a liberal sociology professor at the
University of California at Berkeley, takes note in his new book that the
American character has been forged by the pride Americans take in
themselves and their accomplishments. "There is an American cultural
center; it's assimilative pull is powerful; and it is distinctive or 'exceptional,'" he writes in "Made America: A Social History of American Culture and Character."

He meticulously documents three and half centuries of the American
experience -- from colonial days to the present -- and tells how the nation's
natural abundance has been the engine of growth, forming the national
character reflecting a belief in expanded opportunity. We have far more than
our ancestors could have dreamed of -- more material goods, better health,
greater access to information and a greater ability to use it.

He observes that the earlier belief that America is the exceptional
society, as Abraham Lincoln expressed it at Gettysburg, has been badly
ruptured by recent historians who focus only on the nation's flaws, poisoning
an entire generation of students.

Over the past four decades, historians have catalogued the details of
our devils, attempting to exile the better angels of our nature to the trash bin. Teachers have recast a "shining city on the hill" to a befouled environment
where Indians were murdered, Africans enslaved, workers repressed,
immigrants exploited. The unique American enthusiasm to right wrongs is
overlooked or ignored as unimportant.

Fischer is something of a "fellow traveler" with Alexis de
Tocqueville, finding the 19th century Frenchman's insights into American
"volunteerism" -- an ability to sustain individualism in social groups -- as the
key to progress: "Equality in the American context is not equality of
outcome, but equality of opportunity, treatment and freedom."

The Founding Fathers were educated men smart enough to draw on
the sentiments and innate sense of justice of the common (and uneducated)
man for support. Americans have had the willingness to mingle comfortably
in neighborhood, regional and ethnic groups, charitable and political
institutions that cut across economic lines. What enables cohesion is the
"can-do" attitude of self-reliance.

The most recent phenomenon that illustrates this thesis is the
explosion of the tea parties. Their rugged, ragged organizing principles have
forged alliances similar to those of the early American colonists who worked
toward the common goal of limited government organized to guarantee
maximum individual liberty. The tea parties are moving the debate today,
reminding us of the vitality of our own democracy. There's nothing faux
about that.